[Beaker-devel] Beaker 0.14.2 to be deployed next Thursday, 7th November

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at redhat.com
Fri Nov 1 08:28:07 UTC 2013


All,

The upstream release of Beaker v0.14.2 has been published today on
beaker-project.org [1].

Assuming the final pre-deployment checks go well, we anticipate that
this release will be deployed to the main Red Hat Beaker instance
next Thursday the 7th November at midnight UTC.


= What's coming up in this release? =

The most significant updates included in Beaker 0.14.2 are:

* addon repos will be imported correctly for post-Alpha 3 RHEL7 builds
* the btrfs technical preview in RHEL6 will once again be supported
* provisioned EFI systems will always be reconfigured to boot from the
network interface, even if the installed distribution switches them to
local boot by default
* the default authentication configuration will be used on all
distributions, not just on RHEL6. The new "auth" ks_meta setting will
allow this to be configured directly in the recipe XML
* the inventory task will once again handle s390x and ppc64 systems
* group owners will be identified on the group page for all users,
making it easier to request membership of appropriate groups
* some situations that would previously cause a recipe to hang
indefinitely will correctly cause it to Abort

A description of the changes in the release can be found in the updated
Beaker 0.14 release notes [2].

The complete list of all changes made since Beaker v0.14.1 is also
available [3].


= Beaker 0.15 status update =

After the attempted deployment of Beaker 0.15 revealed some significant
gaps in our regression and acceptance testing for Beaker, we took the
time to critically assess the functional differences between Beaker 0.14
and 0.15 revealed by the upgrade, and determined that additional time
was needed to ensure that the new access control model in Beaker 0.15
was certain to meet the needs of *all* of our internal users. While the
upstream Beaker v0.15.1 release resolved the most significant
regressions in capability (and is thus suitable for deployment in most
environments), we have determined that there is still at least one
remaining case where command-line based automation that worked correctly
in Beaker v0.14 is currently not supported in Beaker v0.15.1.
Accordingly, the Beaker v0.15.1 upstream release will *not* be deployed
internally at Red Hat.

While we continue to work on ensuring Beaker v0.15.2 restores command
line access to the affected functionality (or an acceptable equivalent),
we have reactivated the Beaker v0.14 maintenance branch and backported
the applicable fixes and minor features from Beaker v0.15 and v0.15.1
that met the criteria for inclusion in a maintenance release.

Another Beaker v0.14.3 maintenance release is anticipated after this
one, with Beaker v0.15.2 likely to be deployed following the
completion of the RHEL6.5 formal testing period.


= Thanks to... =

All of our users who provided detailed failure reports in Bugzilla
during the ~24 hour period that Beaker v0.15 was live, allowing us
to identify the gaps between the functionality offered by the
relatively ad hoc access control mechanism in Beaker v0.14 and the
more formalised (and configurable) access control mechanism in
Beaker v0.15. This feedback also identified several specific issues
with the updated web interface that weren't evident in the test
data that we were using at the time.

Jiri Jaburek for working out that there was still an unacceptable gap
between Beaker v0.14 and even Beaker v0.15.1 when it came to managing
manual system reservations through the command line interface.


= Get in touch =

  If you have any questions about Red Hat's Beaker installation, contact
beaker-user-list at redhat.com or join #beaker on internal IRC.

  The activities of the core Beaker development team are managed through
HSS Confluence and JIRA Agile [4].

  For questions about the upstream Beaker project, contact
beaker-devel at lists.fedorahosted.org or join #beaker on FreeNode.

  If you're interested in helping to improve Beaker more directly, refer
to the upstream developer guide [5] and technical road map [6].

Regards,
Nick.

[1] http://beaker-project.org/releases/
[2] http://beaker-project.org/docs/whats-new/release-0.14.html#beaker-0-14-2
[3] http://beaker-project.org/releases/beaker-0.14.2-ChangeLog
[4] https://docs.engineering.redhat.com/x/D4C_/
[5] http://beaker-project.org/dev/guide/
[6] http://beaker-project.org/dev/tech-roadmap.html

-- 
Nick Coghlan
Red Hat Infrastructure Engineering & Development, Brisbane

Testing Solutions Team Lead
Beaker Development Lead (http://beaker-project.org/)


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